She tried, sometimes, to remember how it had been to be young. Or even, not quite so old.

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal — the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.

I sometimes wish to be a kid again and go through life a little differently.

Oh God! Having just one life was so little.

She could remember the girl she used to be with fondness, but it wasn’t a youth she cared to recapture.

She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.

For I was only a young lad, and my life had been bleak and barren. Small wonder that the call of youth set every fibre of me a-quiver.

It seems like all this life was just a dream

لم انلها ابدا كاملة..كانت شبه الحياة

I find that life is easier when it is just a blur
With no details to confuse who or what or where I was
So when the ending comes the full regret will be obscure

Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we’d left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it myself again and again and again.